Archive for September, 2006

I’m going to try to remember to do this every month, because it’s slightly interesting and sometimes kind of strange. Here are the top search strings which have taken people to mogendorff.com in the last month:

Two stories in the Washington post worthy of note today: firstly, Heralded Iraq Police Academy a ‘Disaster’. Unfortunately they’re not talking about a remake of the “classic” 80s comedies, it’s grim reading.

Also Congress blasts HP tactics. This is to do with the fact that Hewlett Packard executives had their phones and other communication monitored by the company in order to find out who was leaking stories to the press. Or something (here’s a timeline). The reason I’m noting it is that HP testifying to Congress, who are all up in arms about the awfulness of unauthorized wiretapping, when in fact that’s exactly what they’re suggesting the National Security Agency does to, potentially, every person in the country.

Here’s an interesting story from the BBC: Woman shares terror of vegetables. I used to have an acquaintance in Scotland who had a fear of cheese. Needless to say nobody treated it as much more than a joke but there was one time some of us were having dinner and he showed up during, you guessed it, the cheese course. He was visibly nervous, edgy and pale, especially as we were laughing and someone chased him around the room with some stilton (yes we had had a few drinks).

But there are some pretty serious phobias out there. My friend Richard put up a post ages ago about someone with a fear of pasta which generated 152 comments (the first of which I now see was from me, talking again about the fear of cheese guy). Lots of people with all kinds of phobias – a lot with kids who have fear of buttons. Several also from people who say they have a fear of hearing people eat, especially crunchy foods. I’m not sure if this one is actually a phobia – for me hearing people chew is really gross and makes me quite uncomfortable but I don’t think it goes as far as a phobia.

Mmm, lots of Republicans will be coming to the Twin Cities in 2008 for the GOP Convention (for non-Americans, GOP stands for Grand Old Party, a bit of a misnomer these days in my opinion). I guess it’s good publicity for the Cities and a revenue draw, so we’ll have to just deal with our souls being tainted with pure evil for a few days.

We’ve had quite a full house this weekend – our friend Arwen was over for a few days to see people and go to a wedding on Saturday, and Emma’s parents are here too, for a quick visit.

Toby has been revelling in all the goings on – particularly enjoying his grandad being here which is excellent especially as they haven’t seen each other for over a year. There’s been lots of soccer and running about, and Toby has even come to terms with the fact that his grandad calls it football. In fact Grandad is the only person who is allowed to do this.

We were quite impressed with Toby last night – at dinner he said that once he was done he wanted to read his book about the hungry triangle, where a triangle gets bored of having only three corners so gets change into a quadrilateral, but that gets boring so he becomes a pentagon, etc etc until he has so many angles he doesn’t know what to do so decides to go back to being a triangle again. We asked Toby what shape the table was and how many corners it had, and got the correct answer. Then Emma’s dad (a bit of a maths geek) asked how many corners a circle has. Toby’s answer was “it has lots and lots of corners but they are very small [holding his thumb and forefinger very close together] so you can’t see them”.

I heard back from Apple on the issue I’d logged – the response basically said “I’m an iTunes person and I can’t answer questions about your iPod [even though the form appeared to allow someone to log iPod issues]. Please check the iPod site for help.” This, of course, I had been doing for a couple of days since I found the problem, and Apple’s help was no use.

So I started casting around the user discussions, and most were people saying that they’d had this problem. Eventually I came across a long thread with a .long potential solution which I thought I’d give a try.

In a nutshell it seems that an authentication file probably vanished from the iPod when I upgraded to iTunes 7/iPod 1.2. The instructions got the file back – it was a bit of a palaver but not that hard and totally worth it. I wrote to the guy who suggested the fix:

Enable the iPod for disk use.

Go to “my computer” and from the tools menu/folder options/view tab, enable “show hidden files and folders” in the advanced settings pane. Open the iPod in “my computer”. Look for a file called “iEKinfo”. Is it there? If so, make a copy of this file and save it somewhere easy to find (the desktop for instance). Do this also with the “iTunes DB” file. Don’t worry if you can’t see these files.

** I had the iTunesDB file, but not iEKinfo. Not sure if that got lost when I upgraded to iTunes 7/iPod 1.2 **

Create a new administrator account. Log out of the current account and log in to the new one. Then restore the iPod to factory settings.

Open iTunes, connect the iPod and set the transfer preferences to manual transfer. Then download the free single of the week from the iTunes Music Store. Verify that song plays in iTunes.

Now, drag this song only to the iPod, and eject the iPod from iTunes and disconnect it from the computer.

Does the song play on the iPod ok? If so, log out of the new user account and log back in to your normal one (the one you have issues with) and reconnect the iPod to the computer. Keep manual transfer selected for the moment. Drag some of the older purchased music (the ones that wouldn’t play before) to the iPod.

Eject the iPod and disconnect it. Do those songs now play ok?

** Yes it worked just great. I had iTunesDB and iEKinfo on the iPod too. Then I set the iPod to automatically update, synced all my music and everything plays like a treat. **